NASRS Season 16 Race 3 (Oulton Park)

Earlier this week the Wednesday split for NASRS season 16 was at Oulton Park for a 65 minute “highly changeable weather” race. I raced here with NASRS a couple seasons ago and generally wasn’t too crazy about the track. It’s really bumpy and very tight which also means it’s very difficult to make clean overtakes. But after practicing a bit for this race (and doing the race itself), I’ve moved into the “neutral” camp on Oulton Park. It requires a lot of precision re: car placement, which makes it a really challenging track that never gets boring. Plus, since mistakes are so easy to make it lends itself to interesting races that tend to shake up the usual pecking order.

The qualifying session was dry and I got lucky with a couple good laps and ended up in P3. There are a lot of really fast drivers in the Wednesday split and if everyone nailed a lap and hit their potential I’d probably be in the P6-P8 range. So this season I’m viewing anything better than P6 as a positive qualifying session.

I was a little bit out of position at the start, but had a good T1 and held my spot. I had a minor door bang with P4, but it was a racing incident so no harm, no foul. I settled into P3 and watched the two lead cars stretch their legs and get a comfortable lead. I knew I didn’t have the pace to compete with them so I was just trying my best to run clean laps and hold off P4, which I did for most of the first stint.

Right before the race started the weather forecast changed to “rain in 30” so we all were expecting rain, we just didn’t know how long it would last. After about 12 minutes the forecast changed to partly cloudy so that gave us our answer. I figured as long as the outlook stayed dry I would just stay on slicks and gut out the 12+ minutes. Then I’d change to new slicks during the mandatory pit stop and maybe increase the PSI a bit in order to account for the colder track surface.

So it was no surprise when it started raining on lap 16. I was still in P3 and was doing an OK job of holding my own. But the guy in P4 is a fast, solid driver who was also in an Aston Martin, which is great in the rain. Consequently, he was starting to catch up while I was beginning to struggle in the wet conditions.

I made my first big mistake of the race on lap 21 when a lapse of focus made me miss my braking marker, causing me to run wide on T4 (Island Bend). Most of the time when this happens you lose control of your car and end up slamming into the wall. Thankfully I was able to nurse my car back onto the track and only lost one position. However, P5 was right on my tail. And, unfortunately, that mistake wasn’t my last of the lap. I ran a little wide on the exit of T12 and almost spun out on the wet curb. So, one more place lost there, which put me into P5. I needed to go a few laps deeper before I made my pit stop so I hung on for dear life and tried to keep the car on the track.

I boxed on lap 24 and had a good stop, taking on fuel and new slick tires. (The rain had stopped at this point.) When I came out of the pits I was in P6, but P5 spun out later in the lap so I picked up a place there.

At this point I was about 3.5 seconds behind P4, who is a very fast and consistent driver. I was also about 7 seconds ahead of P6 so I was kind of figuring that this would be how things ended. However, I got a bit lucky as P4 made a mistake, went off track, and hit the wall. So I got a freebie and moved into P4. I was able to make up quite a bit of time on P3, but ran out of laps and finished the race in that position.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how things went. It’s always nice to have a race where you don’t make major mistakes (crashes, spins, etc.) and I had two of them this race. So, yeah, that’s a bit of a bummer. But, it’s a tough track and we had tricky conditions so landing P4 seems like a win to me.

We’re on a break next week (July 4th holiday) and are at COTA for a wet race the following week. I’ve never really raced at COTA and don’t know the track well at all so I’ll have some work to do to get ready.

Week 3 final results (Oulton Park)

• Qualifying: P3/18
• Race: P4/18

Here are a few highlights from the race